With the vast amount of data, including business data retained for an enterprise, efficient searching techniques are required to render the data useable. Some search engines permit the searching of structured sources, such as business objects with different elements and groups. Other search engines are suitable for searching unstructured sources, such as documents in a file system or content on the Internet. To search structured sources, it is necessary to provide a recognized attribute and a corresponding attribute value. For example, “purchase order number” and a value may return business object instances having the attribute “purchase order number” and the specified value or range of values. The structure of the request required to form the search tends to be quite rigid and not conducive to the use of natural language, synonyms, acronyms, etc. This rigidity requires a particular skill to effectively search structured data to achieve meaningful results. It would be desirable to reduce this rigidity to enhance usability and reduce the skill required to manipulate and retrieve the desired data from structured sources.